


Imperfect Solutions

by Setcheti



Series: Tremors: the Subtext [19]
Category: Tremors: The Series
Genre: Canon-Typical Violence, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-11-09
Updated: 2013-11-09
Packaged: 2017-12-31 22:43:24
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 3,758
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1037243
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Setcheti/pseuds/Setcheti
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>No one could come up with a better way to get rid of the crabions. While Burt and Larry hunt for nests, Tyler and Malcolm do their part in town...until a careless accident leads to a possible solution.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

Larry stood in the back of Burt’s truck, hanging on to the rollbar with one hand and hefting a fist-sized rock in the other.  The truck swung around a small outcropping of residual boulders and he pitched the rock as far out into the smooth sand on the other side as hard as he could.  Rocks were cheap, plentiful, and just right for stirring up a possible crabion nest from a distance; they were saving the more expensive, less plentiful concussion grenades for use on _confirmed_ crabion nests. 

There had been three of those so far.  Today.  Yesterday, they had found only two.

Larry looked over his shoulder and saw the sand boiling; four today so far, then.  “We’ve got another one!”

From the driver’s seat, Burt Gummer swore.  The truck swung around again and ground to a stop amidst a frustrated spray of sand and gravel, facing the boulders.  Larry pitched another rock; claws snapped through the surface of the sand, and the survivalist sighed.  He pulled down the clipboard that had been resting on the truck’s cracked dash and made a note of the nest’s coordinates, while from behind him he heard the soft _phtup_ - _phtup_ of Larry’s paintball gun as it fired an identifying splatter of lurid color onto the boulders.  They’d come back later – that afternoon, most likely – to eradicate the nests they’d marked that morning.

The clipboard went back up on the dash, and Burt half-turned so he could look up at Larry.  “Ready for the next one?”

The younger man nodded, shouldering his paintball gun.  “I’ve still got half a bucket of rocks and a bunch of pellets left, should be enough to finish this sector.”

Burt nodded back.  “Hopefully we won’t be needing any more of the pellets,” he said.  “Tyler and Malcolm can only make so many crabion pots in one morning.”

Larry made a face.  “I wish the chicken wire would have worked.”

“So do I.”  Since it hadn’t, the pots had to be welded together from scrap metal and rebar.  And since the pots couldn’t be emptied – they’d only made that mistake once – new pots had to be created each day.  It was a job that took hours of hard work, hours Tyler and Malcolm put in at the garage while Burt and Larry and sometimes Harlow searched out nests and Cletus, Casey and Roger looked for new and better ways to kill the crabions.  

Unfortunately, they weren’t proving all that easy to kill, even if they were relatively easy to find.  Crabions only seemed to nest around large outcroppings of rock, shifting their locations throughout the day to stay in the rock’s cooling shadow, and although they burrowed beneath the sandy dry soil they didn’t go down any further than claw-snapping range of the surface.  Which was good news, because it meant that there were no huge underground colonies of crabions seething hungrily somewhere under the valley floor.  The bad news was that their mutation was relatively stable; the crabions would not be dying out quietly like the iguana bunnies or floundering their way to eventual messy extinction like the cyobactyls. And nothing seemed to be willing to eat them, either.  In fact, the seismo-monitor records proved that any time El Blanco had gotten close to one of the nest areas the big Graboid had immediately changed direction and left the area as quickly as he could. 

Luckily, the crabions were still a long way from Perfection and didn’t seem to be spreading towards it.  Twitchell had seen to getting them a truckload of scrap metal and some extra welding equipment for making crabion pots, and today he’d brought in two military men with some napalm to test Burt’s idea of burning out the nests.  Casey, Roger and Cletus hadn’t yet had any luck coming up with a more permanent solution, which meant that for the time being the only way to deal with the crabion problem was to hunt down the nests one by one and then trap or – hopefully – burn out the nests’ venomous, carnivorous, high-jumping and fast-moving occupants.  And even once they did eventually find something that worked, it was still going to take weeks of nest hunting and months more of careful surveillance to make sure they’d eliminated all of the crabions.  

Of course, if they never found a better solution, the crabions could end up being the mutation that eventually drove the humans out of the valley for good.  Not only could they make it next to impossible for the local ranchers to put their stock out on the range, but they might also eventually find a concrete-foundation building to be the same kind of welcome shade-provider as an outcropping of residual boulders.  Burt scowled as he steered his truck obliquely towards the next outcropping.  Four nests today, so far.  How many would they be finding tomorrow?


	2. Chapter 2

Tyler and Malcolm had already put in a long morning’s work, and they only had two completed crabion pots to show for it and a third one about half done. They might be able to finish that and make a start on a fourth pot before Burt and Larry came back, but if there were more than three nests to clear Tyler didn’t know what they were going to do. The Army guys were there to try out the napalm today, sure, but they’d still have to have at least one pot with them as backup in case the napalm didn’t work the way Burt was hoping it would.

Tyler set aside the hammer he’d been using and straightened up, stretching. “I think we need to take a break,” he told Malcolm, who was carefully bending metal slats with a crowbar at the other end of their half-completed pot number three. “If Nancy comes out here and sees us…”

“Don’t remind me,” Malcolm requested wearily, sitting back on his heels. He swiped at a stray drop of sweat with the back of one gloved hand. “I think my ears are still ringing from yesterday’s diatribe.”

“Mine too.” Tyler stretched again, and then stood up; Malcolm did the same. “Garage or store?”

The Englishman shook his head. “We’re already here and there’s cold soda in the refrigerator. I vote we don’t go farther than we have to.”

“Sounds good to me,” Tyler agreed. “You grab the sodas, I’ll turn on the fan. “

 

From her kitchen window, Nancy watched the two of them disappear inside the garage and went back to her dishes with a sigh. She’d been wanting to go out there and chase them into the shade half an hour ago, but she hadn’t. She couldn’t. Because those ‘crabion pots’ the two of them were making couldn’t wait, they had to be ready when Burt and Larry came back from finding nests. And no one had any way of knowing how many nests were going to be found.

Nancy had a bad feeling it was going to be more than the two they’d found the day before. And those two nests had been a long way from town; the sector Burt and Larry were checking today was closer. Harlow wasn’t with them this morning, having been needed out at Rosalita’s ranch to move some of her stock. Hopefully he wouldn’t find a crabion nest by accident while he was out working, the way Malcolm and Larry had four days ago. 

Four days ago when they’d come just that close to losing Malcolm to a crabion sting. Larry was still…well, reacting to that. Or maybe not just to that. Nancy frowned at the dishes in their swirl of slightly discolored water – well water in Perfection had a high mineral content and therefore tended to come out of the tap faintly orange whether you used a filter or not. Twitchell had been right when he’d said they couldn’t afford to keep secrets in their small, dangerous community, because those secrets could and probably would come out at the most inopportune time. She thought Malcolm’s had most likely come out after he’d been stung by the crabion. And now Larry knew, possibly Burt and Tyler too, maybe even Cletus. When she’d shown up at the lab four days ago there had been a certain weight in the air, a sense that there were a lot of things going unsaid because she was there. And yet in a way she’d been relieved by that, because she’d thought ever since meeting Malcolm that what he really needed was to be able to trust somebody with his past. There had been a lot of silences in the lab that day, but they’d been _shared_ silences.

She wasn’t going to go so far as to be thankful for the crabions because their appearance had caused that to happen, but then again things tended to work out that way in Perfection so she could at least be happy that something good had come out of a situation that was looking like it could become very, very bad. 

Nancy looked out the kitchen window again, seeing the half-finished crabion pot in front of the garage, and she shook her head. Once the crabions had been dealt with, she was going to sit Tyler’s cousin down and have a very long talk with him about secrets – not to demand answers from him, but to make sure he knew that he could trust her too if something happened. Until then, though, she would do whatever little things she could to make things easier for everyone. Today that would be taking over lunch for Tyler and Malcolm, some nice homemade tomato soup, minus the side order of lecture she knew the two younger men were expecting. It might not be much, but every little bit helped.


	3. Chapter 3

Burt’s truck roared into Perfection and slammed to a stop in front of the garage, and Burt jumped out almost before the tires had stopped spinning. Everyone in town except for Jodi was already there, including Twitchell and two embarrassed-looking men in fatigues. “Would someone please tell me what the hell is going on!” the survivalist demanded, pulling off his sunglasses. “Jodi just said that we needed to come right back, that it was urgent.”

“It was,” Twitchell assured him. “Just urgent for the two of you, not so much for us. Threat’s all taken care of here.”

“We found a way to kill the crabions.” Tyler explained. There were dark red splotches on his shirt and pants, but he shook his head when Burt’s eyes widened in alarm. “Not what you think – it’s tomato soup. I got splashed when Nancy threw it at the crabion these two guys,” he jerked a thumb at the soldiers, “let loose in town.”

“Imagine our surprise,” Malcolm chimed in; he, too, was splashed with red. “There we are, sitting in the garage, minding our own business…”

“Takin’ a break in the shade, like we were supposed to be,” Tyler interjected, with a nod for Nancy.

“When movement catches our eye, and from out of the shadows steps a creature which should not in any way, shape or form have been where it was standing,” Malcolm continued with a flourish. “A live, unrestrained crabion…standing between us and the door.”

“Venom drippin’ from its tail, little beady cone eyes followin’ our every move,” Tyler said. “We were still trying to figure out what to do when Nancy comes in, spots the crabion, screams, and throws the pot of soup she was carrying at it.”

“Whereupon the crabion staggered and fell over, twitched for a little bit, and then died in a most unspectacular fashion. Although we still aren’t entirely sure why.” Malcolm waved a hand vaguely in the direction of the lab. “Our resident science-types took the carcass away; they believe they should be able to isolate the cause of death fairly quickly. Which is why we had Jodi call for yourself and Larry to return to town as quickly as possible.”

Burt blinked at both men, then turned to Nancy. “You killed a crabion…with tomato soup?”

“Homemade tomato soup,” she corrected. “I made it for lunch! But if that’s what it takes to kill those things, I can make more.”

“That would be a dreadful waste of your wonderful cooking,” Malcolm objected, shaking his head. “I’m sure they’ll come up with a better solution than that.” 

“I certainly hope so – I can only imagine the hassle I’d get if I tried to requisition a sprayer truck full of tomato soup to kill monsters with,” Twitchell said. He tucked his thumbs under his belt, rocked on his heels. “As you can see, I brought these two highly trained military men to Perfection with me to try out your napalm idea, Gummer,” he said. “They were messing around over at the store and their little test subject slipped its leash. They noticed it was gone about thirty seconds before we heard all hell break loose in the garage.”

“We didn’t know it could get out of the cage…”

“If you’d paid any attention to the reports I gave you, you would have,” Twitchell snapped at him. “Gummer and his people had already figured out that crabions could work their way through chicken wire, so I’m not sure why you thought you could bring the damned thing in here in a glass tank and then stick a wire lid on it like it was your pet iguana while you ran off to play someplace else.” The man retreated back into embarrassed silence and Twitchell rolled his eyes, returning his attention to Burt. “We can still try the napalm if you want. I’m sure _you_ know how to use it.”

“I do.” Burt considered. “We marked four nests in today’s sector before Jodi called us in, though. It would be nice if a less toxic – and less expensive – method of extermination were available. The fewer chemicals we spread all over the valley the better off we’ll probably all be.” 

“Yeah, more mutations we definitely do not need,” Tyler agreed. “The worst the soup’s gonna do is make tomatoes grow.” He pointed a finger at Larry, whose mouth was opening to say something. “I have seen that movie. Do. Not. Go. There.”

“I wasn’t going to; Mixmaster can’t do that,” Larry defended himself, shaking his head. “It can’t make plants that _walk_.”

“Yet,” both Malcolm and Burt muttered under their breath at the same time.

“Don’t jinx us,” Twitchell complained. “Because if the plants around here start walking around, I’m gonna recommend that we pull out and nuke the site from orbit, got me?”

“If we start seeing creatures from that particular movie, I’ll fire the missiles for you,” came from Malcolm. He returned his attention to Burt. “Four nests, you said?”

“And we hadn’t even covered the entire sector yet,” was the survivalist’s reply. “Have we had any reports of other problems today?”

“A possible cyobactyl attack over by the Angelos’ place, they’re missing a sheep,” Twitchell said with a shrug. “I’m not counting it until they know for sure the damned thing didn’t just wander off. Other than that, nothing.”

Burt thought for a moment, and then he nodded decisively. “I say we should go out to the nearest nest and do the napalm test, just like we’d originally planned,” he said. “Hopefully by the time we come back Cletus and Casey will have more answers for us.”

“We’ll finish off the crabion pot we were working on,” Malcolm told him. “And get a start on the next one, just in case.”

“No, you’ll eat something first,” Nancy contradicted him. “You and Tyler are coming over to the house to get cleaned up and have lunch, and then you can come back out and finish the crabion pot. If we even still need it by then.”

“She has a point,” Burt agreed. “But if a permanent solution doesn’t come as quickly as everyone hopes it will, we’re still going to need at least a few pots on hand.”

“I think a little extra manpower could help with that,” Twitchell said. He gave the two soldiers a look. “Who put the wire lid on the fish tank?” When the younger of the two men, whose name patch identified him as Adams, sheepishly raised his hand, the agent pointed at him. “You’re staying here to help make crabion pots while your buddy goes with Gummer and Larry to test the napalm. And once they come back, he can pitch in too.”

The other soldier, whose patch said Simmons, immediately objected to that. “We weren’t sent out here to…”

“Endanger civilians?” Twitchell spat back, and the man looked at the ground. “No, you weren’t. But in light of the fact that your fuck-up may have had a hand in solving this problem, I’m offering you a one-time only get-out-of-a-reprimand-free card. You pitch in to help, and I’ll conveniently forget to mention how stupid you both were. We understand each other?” The two soldiers hesitated, and then they both nodded. “Good, I knew you weren’t complete idiots. Simmons, you go get your stuff, and Adams, you let the Reed boys here show you what you can get started on while they’re having lunch. Get a move on, we’re burning daylight!”

Simmons made a beeline for the equipment they’d brought, and after flashing Burt a two-fingered salute Twitchell ambled off in his wake. Adams looked from one Reed to the other, fidgeting nervously and not quite meeting either man’s eyes. “I don’t know how to weld.”

“Then we won’t ask you to do that yet,” Malcolm told him with a shrug. “You can sort metal scraps out of the pile in case we need to make more pots today, and when we come back out you can help pound things into shape. Follow me, I’ll pull some pieces out so you’ll know what to look for.”

He led the reluctant soldier around the side of the garage, and Tyler rolled his eyes. “Bet we’ll have to teach him how to use a hammer, too. This should be an interesting afternoon.”

“For all of us,” Burt agreed. “Hopefully the one we’re taking knows what he’s doing, or Larry’s going to get a crash course in practical firebombing.” He did smile, just slightly, when he saw the hopeful look on Larry’s face. “I’ll show you anyway after the current crisis has been settled; it’s the sort of thing you should know how to do properly in case it ever comes up again.” His attention went back to Tyler, his gaze flickering quickly away from the red stains on his lover’s shirt. “We should be back in an hour, hour and a half at the most.”

“We’ll be back out here workin’ on the pots by then,” Tyler told him. “If we can get one more done for today, then we’ve got the four nests you already found covered no matter what.”

“That will work.” Burt hesitated. “You’re sure you’re…”

“It never even got near us, thanks to Nancy,” Tyler reassured him; the more physical reassurance he would have liked to provide would have to wait until later. “And the soup wasn’t hot enough to burn.”

Larry cleared his throat. “Is Malcolm okay?”

“Yeah,” Tyler answered with a shrug. “He turned about three shades of white when he saw that thing watchin’ us from the doorway, but he was grabbin’ something to hit it with at the same time and swearin’ a blue streak –we thought it being there meant they’d made it into town without anyone noticing.” He grinned. “Once Twitchell and the soldiers came runnin’ and we found out what had happened, though, that’s when the fun started.”

“Malcolm verbally ripped those two soldiers into tiny little pieces,” Nancy said. “They were a lot cockier before that.”

“And a few Britishisms aside, he didn’t even use profanity,” Tyler tacked on. “I was impressed. I think Twitchell was too, because he didn’t even try to get a word in edgewise.”

“I wouldn’t have either,” Burt looked at Nancy. “How about you? Are you all right?”

“Since the soup killed it? Yes,” was her answer. “If it hadn’t…”

“Then Malcolm and I would have beat it to death and been sorry about our lunch goin’ to waste,” Tyler told her. “Crabions are dangerous when there’s a bunch of them all in one place, but one by itself is just a big ugly bug.”

“That can jump really high,” Larry added, and was immediately sheepish when Burt and Tyler both gave him the same exasperated look. “Sorry.”

“I already knew that about them anyway,” Nancy reassured him. “And just for the record, I was trying to hit it with the pot, not the soup. No one was more surprised than I was when it fell over and started to twitch.”

Burt shrugged. “Even if the soup – or the pot – hadn’t killed it, the distraction would have given Tyler and Malcolm the opening they needed. _And_ there’s plenty of antivenin at the research station.”

Nancy nodded…but then she saw the look on Larry’s face; whatever thought it was he’d just had, it wasn’t a happy one and he had very obviously swallowed it instead of blurting it out. She frowned. “What?” He shook his head. She stepped closer to him, concerned now. “Larry, what?”

Larry looked at Tyler, who sighed. “The antivenin Cletus used on Malcolm works…but it may only work the first time. On Malcolm, anyway; there’s no tellin’ about the rest of us.”

“They’re only guessing at this point, because no one else has gotten stung. Malcolm’s reaction may have been atypical,” Burt elaborated. “Like someone with an allergy to bee stings. The first sting may make you sick, but the second could kill you – or the second might not, but the third or fourth might.” He shrugged, putting his sunglasses back on. “If we can kill all of the damned things, we won’t have to worry about it.”

Nancy nodded even though she didn’t really agree with him. Burt was just being Burt, always projecting complete confidence that they were going to beat the mutations one more time. Tyler was the same way, and Malcolm – she’d heard all about that from Larry after the first crabion incident. But even if the crabions were wiped out…well, _she_ hadn’t forgotten about the mutated plant pollen. How many other quietly deadly things were out there, waiting for someone to stumble across them? How long would it be before their luck ran out?

 


End file.
